ePublishing Knowledge BaseContinuumCreating, Managing & Selling ProductsHow to Pass an Offer Code to your Users via a URL

How to Pass an Offer Code to your Users via a URL

Continuum has created a way for users to visit your site with an offer code automatically applied to their cart. Simply add the “?offer_code=” parameter plus the offer code to the end of the URLs you are sharing with your users.

Example URL: https://test.epublishing.com/blogs?offer_code=25offAUGUST19

For more information on working with offer codes, please check out the following links:

Continuum Tools Technical Guide - Offer Manager

What You Can Do with the Offer Manager

How do I create discount codes or offers?

The offer code will be stored for the duration of the user’s session and ready for use once the user checks out with products meeting the requirements of the offer code.

There is specific flash messaging that accompanies this functionality, controlled by the following Editorial Content areas:

  • offer.landing.error.msg
  • offer.landing.msg
  • offer.not.applied.msg

offer.landing.error.msg - this message is displayed on the first page the user visits when the offer code passed in the URL is no longer valid

The flash messaging is formatted as:

<Editorial Content Body>

offer.landing.msg - this message is displayed on the first page the user visits when the offer code passed in the URL is valid

The flash messaging is formatted as:

<Editorial Content Body>

<Offer Code>: <Offer name>

offer.not.applied.msg - this message is displayed on the /cart page when the offer code passed in the URL is valid but the user does not yet have products in their cart meeting the requirements of the offer code

The flash messaging is formatted as:

<Editorial Content Body>: <Offer Name> | <Offer Description>

Additional Information

The offer_code parameter will support 1 offer code, meaning that you can pass one offer code at a time via URL. If your site is setup to only allow one offer code per cart purchase (via the system setting cart.­limit.­to.­single.­offer.­code), then the most recently applied code will remain in the cart. If your site is setup to allow multiple codes, then multiple codes will remain in the cart throughout the user’s session.

There are some pages/templates where the message flag and offer code are not designed to work for various reasons:

Homepage

All sites have custom homepages, so this won’t work out of the box. Never fear, your friendly knowledgeable ePublishing Project Manager can assist you with an estimate for this simple update. 

Any page tagged to the Blank Page Classification

These do not contain the functionality that listens for the offer code because they are set to use a blank template. 

/subscriptions/create_trial and any page being redirected containing the v=preview parameter

These involve redirect requests and the offer code listening functionality only exists for one request. 

The following templates are cached differently in our system to keep our servers running as efficiently and quickly as possible:

/authors

/authors/:id

/classifieds

/events

/keywords/:id

/media

/media/podcasts

/media/podcasts/:id

/media/videos

/publications

/publications/:id

/topics

/topics/:id,:id

/topics/:id